Shift
by infiniteviking
Summary: Ghosts can be brave... but they can also be lost. Beyond the threshold of darkness, the dead must lead the dead. TVverse, gen, angst, missing scene from Things That Go Bump.


**Shift**

In the first moment of choking horror, he did not notice that the manacles were gone.

Bob hadn't possessed a physical form for centuries, but if he'd had one, the dead would have crushed it out of existence. The darkness teemed with them: in fact, it could be stated with some degree of accuracy that the darkness _was_ the dead, clustered and crammed amongst one another like an Escher print occupying far too many dimensions, above and between, beside and below.

The Other Side had closed around his narrow shoulders after only three steps: two more than any mortal could have taken and lived. Past Harry Dresden's threshold, of course, there was nothing that resembled a floor -- the illusion of walking was a comfortable affectation which he had grown used to indulging. But when the light went out behind him, breaking his last tie to living matter, he could almost have forgotten that he had ever walked before.

And even as he took his first true taste of death, death reached into him and tasted him back.

For a time the thunder blotted all sensation. Twisting in the tide, he finally realized that his bonds had been cut, that he was freer than he had ever been in the centuries since his death: his wrists, such as they were, no longer bore the weight of his curse.

His first thought was: _Perhaps Harry has already tried to summon me back_.

That was ridiculous -- or so he tried, for an ugly, uncomfortable moment, to convince himself.

He was an old ghost. Since his betters had executed him for meddling with the Black, from shipboard to strange shores and for ages in the towers and dungeons of his masters, Hrothbert of Bainbridge had dared to dream of freedom. The innocent past was long beyond his reach, and with it the most sacred of his hopes, but he had told himself that just a little more autonomy was all that he desired.

Now he had it. And he wanted to go home.

He tried to yell with the dead pressed against him, wrenching and clinging and surging, wearing at the fibers of his soul.

He thought the yell was answered.

_Harry_? he shouted, suppressing a panicked impulse to invoke the man's full name here - of all the colossally bad mistakes a dead man could make, that would be among the worst. But no harm could come of the first name -- or could it?

_Harry_! The name was torn away among the dead.

Again there was an answer. It had shifted, this time; it was somewhere else -- or was Bob? The ghost forced himself to move, wrenching the un-life aside as though swimming through mud. Giant forms surged by, inhuman, unknowable; he floundered helplessly in the tide of their passing. Of course the Other Side was home to more than those who had once been alive.....

The reply was closer this time. A tiny thread of purpose. A name he knew, and a voice.

"_Malcom Dresden,_" he breathed. (Or would have, if breath had been possible here.)

A man he had only seen twice, but never formally met.

Harry's father.

**.o0o.**

The spirit seemed to grip his arm. The touch was as chilling as it was unexpected, a spine-crawling death grip holding no memory of human warmth. Some thread of sanity -- drawn between them, perhaps, by common purpose -- allowed them to see one another as they saw themselves, granting a tenuous memory of their living forms.

"Mr. Dresden--"

"I," gasped Malcom, "am -- _not -- here_. I--" He stared wildly around, his eyes sliding past Bob as though he was not there either, then focusing again with a visible effort. "Have to get to--"

Bob instinctively brought a hand toward Malcom's temple, but realized in time that he could not reach into this man's mind and find out what was wrong. The icy clutch at his sleeve proved that well enough.

"Harry," he prompted. "You have to get to Harry." There could be no other reason for Malcom Dresden, who should have safely crossed Beyond, to linger in this realm of insanity.

"To Harry," echoed Malcom. "He's in this -- and--"

The voice stuttered and caught as another wave of chaos crashed down. Mindless things shrieked around them. His equilibrium shattered, Bob instinctively threw his arms around Malcom's torso as the tide attempted to wrench them apart.

The thin wraith was shaking, weeping, his fingers clawing through the dark. Bob realized with astonishment that the two of them were of a height. Harry was taller by several inches. _You would be proud of your son._

"I've just come from him," said Bob, suddenly desperate to give Malcom Dresden something of the child he had left behind. "Just now; he's well -- was very well when I left him -- doing all he can to escape--"

"He's this way," said the spirit. His eyes glittered, feverish but certain. "I can't stand this place. It's, it's, they'll kill him -- it shouldn't be this way."

"It isn't." Bob tried to be reassuring. "It wasn't for you."

"But," gasped Malcom. "But this is different. He's here already." His voice broke. "I -- we were never.... we never came this way. I can't let them... he'll be lost--"

"No. Not Harry. He'll get out of this; he's performed comparable feats before."

Malcom seemed to stare through him, as though at a vision or a memory.

"You're Justin's ghost, aren't you?"

Bob flinched.

"Not anymore."

"You were."

"Not anymore. _Never_."

"How do I know that? You want me to trust you now? No. No. You don't understand: I can't let this happen to Harry."

"It won't," insisted Bob. "When he crosses over, which won't be for good long time -- did you know that a wizard's lifespan far outreaches that of other mortals? He may well live for centuries -- and the time he spends here will be imperceptible. He will not go through this. Neither should you."

Something lit in Malcom's soul, and for a warped moment Bob hardly knew what creature was lurking before him. For the first time, he understood why his former employer had gone to the trouble of murdering this man.

"I'll kill you," Malcom growled. "If any of you hurt my son.... I'd kill them all if she let me."

Bob whispered, "Who's she?"

He never got an answer.

The blow came out of nowhere, tore the two spirits apart in a haze of blinding pain. At once Bob lost all sense of direction; he fell through a liquid mass of spirits that shrieked and clawed at one another in distress at the psychic disturbance. Another blow came, tearing through Bob as he tried to orient himself. He shouted in anger and pain, lashing back, encountering nothing but a roiling hatred that he knew too well to mistake for anyone else.

The ghost of Justin Morningway, shredded and dessicated, struck again.

They were evenly matched for once, or would have been if Bob had not suffered multiple centuries of incorporeality. Justin, accustomed to cause-and-effect, attacked with single-minded confidence. "This is all your fault," the gargoyle thundered. "I'm here because of you -- here again because of you... I waited, I planned, and you sent me back!"

Bob twisted away, trying to gather himself as Justin advanced. "What's the matter?" he gasped. "Come to gloat? You're early. They're still alive, and that's something you'll never be again."

Justin had always had been good at these games, held an instinctive, unparalleled knack for twisting the knife. He grappled with Bob, both blinded by what surrounded them, clawing at whatever they could find; and he didn't shut up. "It's poetic, don't you think? Every moment, the darkness grows stronger. This will be no easy death. He could have faded away quietly, before, but no -- you had to _stop me_."

Bob would have done it any time: as many times as it took. He was no Dresden, to preserve those gentle scruples. Malcom was unbalanced, had family ties to uphold, had never sought to be schooled in the harsh truths of magic and death; Hrothbert of Bainbridge could claim no such excuse....

..he tried to say so, but found himself locked in a stranglehold, ripping at Justin's spirit even as it ripped at him; if this was his last deed he could stand it, he had before, although the thought sneaked in that an eternity at his enemy's throat could get old far too quickly....

..and then something had torn Justin away, murder flooding from it like a flame in the darkness, leaving searing afterimages.

Malcom.

"_Monster, stay away from my son-_-!"

Before Bob could intervene, a tide of spirits bowled them all over.

No, not a tide. A stampede, the terrified bow-wave of something immense.

For a panicked moment Bob remembered the huge shapes that had swarmed past him before; but those had taken no notice of anything else. These, slow and defying conventional notions of scale, stalked hunterlike, with hungry thoughts searching the souls that fled before them. The tiny flares of hate and rage tainting the darkness were snuffed like smoke under their sight.

The dim shapes loomed closer, grasped Justin's arms and neck; in comparison he was small, frightened, human. There was a faint glow of scarlet under their fingers, and a fleeting sound or smell of molten metal. Justin's mouth gaped in a silent scream as they pulled him close, and one raised something that might have been its head to regard Bob from the depths of an eerily flowing hood. A chill lanced through him; he was marked, branded, frozen in place.

Cold hands clutched at his shoulders, dragging him close. He couldn't think; there was no room in him for anything but fear. His sins had found him out--

--and they were casting him headlong through a door--

**.o0o.**

He fell right through the young lady Warden, which was utterly unfair of the universe in the state the Other Side had left him. Staggered, some aspect of him again plucked and oriented by gravity, he could do nothing but haul in reflexive breaths that he didn't need and try to banish the tide of horror back to its native dark.

There was light around him again, and silence, and sound; the warmth of the living realm, its many heartbeats a subtle, fluttering pulse against his evanescent form. The invisible chains of his curse were back, heavy on his wrists. He could feel them, feel everything again, in the subtle fashion that he had hardly noticed before it had gone. And Harry was beside him, asking in a panicked voice whether he was all right, whether he had been free.

_There's no freedom in there_.

Not for him, certainly, and not for the likes of Morningway.

Even less for the lean, mad, savage magician who had broken himself trying to tear a passage through to his son.

_____


End file.
